We spent this morning making candles. It is a marvellously soothing process, dipping wax candles. You start off with a length of wick the right thickness for the candle you want to end up with, as too fat or too thin and it will keep guttering out or burn down in no time at all. Uncoated wick floats in melted wax, but you puddle your length of wick around the surface a couple of times and stretch it straight with your fingers. Then you leave it to cool and dry. There's a lot of leaving things to cool, making hand dipped candles.
Then you just keep dipping, not too often, and leaving the nascent candle between times. It needs to go into the molten wax at a reasonable pace, and straight out again, or you'll melt off as much as you add. As it gets fatter, you can roll it between two panes of glass if you wish, to make the sides smoother and straighter, but I don't bother, since I'm only planning to burn them at the dinner table, not show them.
The beekeepers have accumulated quite a range of equipment, some purpose made bought off the shelf over the years, and some ingeniously fabricated by members out of old pieces of kit cadged from workplaces or bought on e-Bay. Some is very low tech but eminently sensible, like the pot of lightweight bulldog clips and the racks of wood with small nails banged into them. You can put a clip on each wick, loop the handle over a nail, and leave your candles hanging up to cool, instead of standing endlessly with one in each hand. This frees up your hands for other things, like drinking coffee and eating chocolate biscuits.
We have a good collection of silicone moulds too, built up by investing in two or three new ones each year out of divisional funds. Good quality candle moulds are not cheap, but we can turn out some pin sharp fir cones and miniature beehives, for those that like that sort of thing. They are flexible one piece moulds, split down one side so that you can get the finished candle out, with a hole in the base to lead the wick through. A pair of cocktail sticks held together with rubber bands rested across the top will hold the wick straight, and a few more bands around the mould will hold it shut. The silicone is so squidgy and fits together so snugly that not a drop of wax seeps through the join. The candle is ready to decant when the surface of the wax darkens and the edges start to shrink back from the mould. I contented myself with one moulded Christmas tree, and rubbed gold powder on the tips of its branches with a finger. Other people were making wax tree decorations, and casting embossed wax lumps for stiffening sewing thread.
It's a gentle activity. You can't be in a hurry, since wax cools at the rate that it cools, and the chat flows freely over how our bees did this year, and life in general. A guide to fungus was brought out to try and identify some mystery specimens on a tree stump: answer, not honey fungus but not one of the edible species. The problems of training young dogs were aired, someone turned up in a vintage MG he'd just got back from the restorers (at the price they charged he was going to renew the trim himself), the identity of various useful pieces of hardwood being hoarded in the host's garage was speculated upon, and the evils of tree hating neighbours deplored.
The smell of wax brought a few curious honey bees to investigate what was going on, and is why we only hold candle making days in early spring or late autumn. We don't want to freeze ourselves, standing about in someone's garage and front garden in the depths of winter, but candle making outside a sealed room is not an activity for the warmer months, when too many bees are flying. You can buy the thermostat controlled water baths for melting the wax and all the rest of it from specialist catalogues, but it's expensive, so unless you are going into quasi commercial production it's better just to make candles with your local beekeepers. Our division holds a group dip once or twice a year, and members can rent the kit for the weekend (though we do charge a hefty deposit in case of accidental damage).
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